Is Drupal ready for the enterprise? [closed]
Answer One: Yes
- internet_search://"drupal in the enterprise" <- use this exact phrase
- Drupal "Success Stories"
- Student Activities Supports 170 Drupal 6 Sites at Texas A&M
Answer Two: It depends
There are surely some who have concerns about this issue. Drupal's database support and schema have been subject to some scrutiny and criticism over its evolution. That is likely to diminish if some or all of the planned enhancements make it into Drupal 7. This is the one out of your three questions that cannot be easily and definitively answered by searching the internet.
Answer Three:
Answer Four: (Update: 2010-02-03 11:25:04)
I recommend against Drupal due to its inefficiency. Yes, it can do almost anything, but it does it slowly. For any but the simplest of sites, drupal will not build nearly as efficient a chain of queries and pages as a custom built site will. Something that can be done by hand with two SQL joins and a single PHP loop is likely to be handled by Drupal with five joins and a nested loop.
That said, I love Drupal and will continue using it in non-enterprise environments, and I cannot recommend any other CMS that does not have similar problems when presented with complex tasks.
It depends on what you mean by "Enterprise." It's a horrible choice if you're building a supply chain management tool, for example.
But if you mean "extremely high traffic sites" or "Sites with complex approval workflows before content goes live" or "sites that we can scale horizontally", then I'd say yes. There are quite a few very large scale Drupal deployments out there, from SonyBMG's suite of artist web sites to newspapers and magazines.